My Issue with Daz Hair
deleted user
Posts: 1,204
Here's my issue. Everything looks like 12th century dutchess hair on the night of a grand festival to celibrate the king of Neverlands' wedding ... Or a Red Carpet broadway hair style for hollywood Nominees...
There is a reason why the Leyton Hair was so pupular... Because its feasable, believable hair that you can acutally see someone having that style of hair.
Sometimes trying to be overly glamorous makes things look very off, and unrealistic. Sometimes, less is more. Some of the hairs I get have so much volume to them trying too hard to be glamorous that it dang near doubles the size of the head and makes the proportions look weird because with the hair, from behind her head looks enormous.
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Comments
agree
there needs to be more simple hair models. Simple ponytails etc. I know there are some available, but the simple stuff is outdated
I loved the OOT Side Tail Hair Because it was feasable, realistic, and didnt try to force its self to be glamorous and beautiful. It just is... And it didnt make the head proportions look weird because it wasnt cracked out with volume...
I can use it on any model and it looks fantastic...I can use it on any age, or any type of render, whether its a 12ths century render, or a 21st. Thats what I like to see. That is what I want to see more of. Leyton hair and Side Tail hair are the only ones I've got so far that arnt trying to be overly dramatic and rely on natural beauity, instead of placing their cards in forced glamor.
You dont get that with Male hair. Most of my Male hair looks GREAT! because, unlike females... They pay more attention to making it look feasable, realsitic hair that men actually do have. Male hair is awesome... Female hair is way too hung up in the tiny world of glamor, and fantasy..And you know youd figure they would have learned that most people like the realstic hairs more. Leyton Hair was a shining example of what people really want...
Type in beauiftiful hair in a google images search and see how many hair styles like this pop up. https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/52/df/6b/52df6bfc2ff3193e707f5ba076343096.jpg
If the hair maker people really wanted to rake in th cash... They would get off the 12th century Dutches Fantasy Hair styles Band Wagon they have been stuck on for the past decade for a minute and produce something more tangable and belevable... Something that gets along with the realism of iRay... And I'm not talking about the surfaces.
i13 Aparment props are great. The lighting is great. The enviorment is great, the girl looks great but there is one issue... I'm trying to make a render of her on the couch in the living room, watching some telli and all the hair props I can find look like she just crawled out of a Limbo to a Red Carpet show.
We have WAY more then enough Fantasy, and glamor fasion show hair styles people. Way more then we will ever need. Between poser, and Daz. There is literally thousands of them... Lets switch gears here Vendors..
@Angel-Wings
Yup, agreeing with you; I'm careful what hair I buy, as many just don't fall into the believable catagory for me; OOT's are usually excellent.
My gotos are Aeon Soul Tulip hair, OOT Zoey hair, Krayon hair, and Buzzed hair (and for most of them I switch the shaders to OOT Iray hair shader pack.)
They're all relatively normal haircuts with a ton of controls built in.
In general though I hate conforming hair because it tends to look ridiculous if you want to do much more than have a character stand upright, and once you give a character a hair, they're stuck with that hair.
For example, say I wanted a character with a mid back length hairstyle for a visual story. There are probably several I can choose for that. Now what if it rains? What if they want to do sport and need a ponytail? Bun? No way to adjust to these sorts of things. Obviously this is nothing to do with PAs and everything to do with using dinosaur technology. Genesis figures get newer and newer but hair and clothing is still back in ancient times.
Couldnt have said it better. The hair is so out dated it dont look right in the new scenes... I should be able to use the Active Pose Tool to select individual Hair and drag the hair around in the scene the way I want it posed. Some of them offer this, but its limited... Very limited. Active Pose Tool and being able to drag around like 40 parts of the hair Thats where the morphs should be. They shouldnt even HAVE morphs at all accept to stylize them. All the hair movment should be done Via Active Pose Tool. I hate scrolling morphs... Its 10,000 times faster to pose the hair with Active Pose tool.
Fully rigged hair is a royal pain to make, which is why vendors don't do it more often.
Which is why you do it to a hair that can transform into several different styles... Do it to a hair that is diverse, and well planed. Hair can be so much more then it is, if people didnt run away the second a challange is presented to them. I would do it myself if I could. I do a lot of my own opacity maps, remaster a lot of the hairs in zbrush already. I just wished I didnt have to "fix" every hair prop that is supposed to be from a professional. I dont mean to sound rude by any means but its like... Common guys. There is half a million hairs out there. A New hair is pumped out almost daily at Daz.... Take a breather from the shop spam, and focus on a good one. When you see the sells. You'll slap for not doing it sooner. It's time for hair to catch up with the times. We are half way to 2017 and here we are dealing with tonka toys with the same tec as from 2004. Hair tec hasnt moved an inch in over a decade. Nor has the Fantasy and Glamor fetsh... It's like everything moves on, but hair... Hair never changes... lol! I can load a poser prop from a very long time ago and make it look just as good, if not better then a Hair style released today... Theres your clue that hair is not keeping up. And it shows in the renders, because everything in the scene looks great, until you add a hair prop then all the realism you worked so hard on, vanishes...
I will admit, there are lots of ideas I've had to scrap simply because I could not find hair, or could not get hair to perform like I needed it to perform.
I often fall back on Omri hair. It has the advantage of being pretty tight so it doesn't distort or need a lot of work, and being high quality.
Thanks to this thread I've rediscovered Leyton hair and it's very simple but functional morphs (sometimes having a zillion morphs just makes things a hassle, having none can suck too.)
While it could be argued that PAs could do more to fully rig hair, I don't think that's really fair (and they can clearly get away with making sales without doing so.) The whole conforming system just isn't cutting it with the level of figures that we have now.
There are programs (such as Marvelous Designer to name one) that have realtime interactive draping and very logical sew pattern style clothing creation. PAs can still make and sell quality clothing that way assuming they make something the average user can't or won't. There are several threads and products (mostly WiP) I've seen made by individuals that can take even Daz clothing and make it dynamic. If one person can program this kind of thing, why can't Daz when they've led the way with their figure improvements in this area? Why is there no dynamic hair studio that PAs can craft hair in and then sell in a range of styles / arrangements? There are two hair plugins for Studio already yet neither has been adapted into Studio itself to be fully supported with current technology and they certainly aren't used for sold hairstyles despite a free player being available.
I understand that there was a dynamic clothing plugin for Studio in the past, but my impression is that it seems to have been rather limiting and never really got supported properly. Just because an effort towards dynamics may not have worked in the past is no reason we shouldn't be looking towards some sort of new technology for hair and clothing with how much things have advanced today.
Daz managed to build Genesis, G2 and G3. They built Studio which does tons of awesome things and many of them most users don't even know are there, but they are. They integrated the Iray engine (which to be fair has improved hair and clothing in the sense of easy to use shaders.) They even managed to implement the monstrosity that is Connect. All these things are meaningless if hair and clothing isn't brought up to date to match them.
I really wish for some normal basic men's hair. I think the guys have many mohawks, but very few normal looking crewcut or shorter styles for the new generations. I haven't seen anyone with a mohawk since the 80's and 90's.
Just normal, no overly sprayed, really tall manga hair.
For normal male hair, one of my favorite go-to hair styles is : http://www.daz3d.com/timeless-male-hair-for-genesis
Nice, simple, parted hair. I also like it on women.
Yes, most of the hair styles in the Daz store look like somebody just stepped out of a beauty salon. Not very practical or reusable in my opinion. There should be a balance of everyday hair styles too. And if one hair style is too common or basic to sell on its own, they could always sell them as a multiple hair pack to make it more interesting.
If there was a special program dedicated to making hair styles, I would try to make my own. But, I know of none.
That is why I look forward to male bundles, its the only way your going to get any kind of hair for a male.
You have a really good idea but the problem is time versus return. Each PA needs to make money to pay their bills like everyone else so each set, regardless of what it is is a question of how much do we put into it versus how much will we get out of it. Its too easy to think like customers and think how adding this or that would be really awsome but then you have to consider how much time it will take to impliment it and then how much do you sell it for so that people will still want it. Using my latest product as an example, it took me over a month to UV map all the parts of the car plus the addon kit for it and there are roughly 2000 parts between the two sets. Again, nothing wrong with your idea.
@joseft
Absolutely - I wanted a simple shoulder length female hair (centre or side parting) that was not styled or looking as though it had been blow-dried within an inch of its life. I searched for ages and could not find anything recent - I eventually used Koz's long evo hair which is around 10 years old and tweaked it in Hexagon.
In order to make money and to remain competitve, vendors have to create new and interesting items. How many styles of Bob hair could be sold that couldn't easily be duped by the user using a magnet? The fact is that people will buy hair that looks interesting or fits their planned renders and they'll be loathe to buy "yet another long hair model" until they've exhausted the options of "long hair models" arealdy available.
The "killer app" for a hair product would be a hair that had several diverse styles. But, why make three hair models, effectively, and sell them all as just one product? Few would be willing to pay for the work necessary to accomplish it and it's more profitable to just sell three different hair models...
PS - There isn't a hair model that I have ever used that I have not tweaked/changed in an outside 3D app. And, there are very, very, few that I have not retextured with realistic textures and higher quality transmaps. As a result, I only buy hair created by vendors who are well-known for their quality. Even then, I sometimes get burned. (Hair items are one of the few things, aside from character textures, that I buy, anymore.)
3 approaches:
- create your own fiber mesh hair
To get realistic hair you may need to exactly replicate the hair count.
This means about 110'000 to 140'000 hair strands on a human head. Now you need at least 7-15 segements so the hair does not knick but actually bends properly. As a result the hair will use up 1-2 Million points or vertices. If you are working with really long hair or fully covered animals you quickly end up getting 20+ Million points.
This can easily take between 2-3 GB VRAM of your video card.
Example:
Bison with fiber hair
~ 10'000'000 triangles using up around 1.7 GB VRAM
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Now you say: Well if it takes that much memory why not try to reduce the point count to less than 1 Million?
Can work. But if you go much lower very likely you hair will now look like thick straw.
-> There is not much point in compromizing with fiber mesh based hair.
Either you go all the way with fiber mesh hair or you better just stick with the old fashioned transparency based hair.
-> Hardware limitations
The main issue is that at the current time most users may have 4 to 6 GB VRAM. This would mean only a small amount of customers could actually handle high poly count fiber mesh hair.
In a few months when the average VRAM is shifting towards 8-12 GB VRAM thanks to new graphic cards then hopefully we may see some artists creating high quality fiber hair solutions without any compromise.
But even then you will still be happy about versatile transparency map based hair for all those characters in the background.
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- plugins for render engine specific hair splines
Some render engines like OctaneRender support hair splines.
Instead of having a hair object with millions of points in the scene the hair is defined with render engine specific curves that take a lot less space in VRAM.
Unfortunately not a lot of hair plugins support creating such curves and those who do support curves may use their own definition for the curves that is not compatilble with each render engine without some adjustments.
There was some talk that LAMH was supposed to be updated to support hair curves in both Iray and OctaneRender. ETA?
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- Nvidia HairWorks?
Nvidia has a lot of developer kits.
https://developer.nvidia.com/gameworks-visualfx-overview
among them Nvidia HairWorks
https://developer.nvidia.com/hairworks
I guess such solutions would not be free.
Personally I wouldn not mind to pay a larger amount of money for advanced DAZ Studio plugins that make use of all the Nvidia "works" toolkits...
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I, personally, would love it if a vendor intentionally, obviously (I've come across a few sets of styles that more or less work for this) made a series of hair models (preferably transmapped, for the reasons outlined in linvanchene's post above) that were intended to be the same hair in different styles, sold them separately, but maybe then had a bundle offer of the 3-5 hair models that were the "one" hair. Yes, I'd expect each model to be in the $12-$20 range (depending on length, morphs, number of colors of texture map, etc.) with the bundle priced accordingly. But I'd still be quite willing to purchase such a series of hairs (finances permitting)
I really like this hair: http://www.daz3d.com/simple-short-haircut-for-genesis-3-male-s. And you get 3 styles which is very useful. I would love more hairs like this.
Me too. I was thinking more you have one base hair which would for example be long straight, no fancy styling, and then addon packs for the base in different styles like ponytail, bun, etc.
I understand why vendors make fancy hairstyles at present, but personally, if I make a piece of artwork with 3D models, I want it to be my characters, not "hey there's a piece of art with X's four wave hair!" (not sure if this makes sense but it's the same with fancy outfits too.)
@linvanchene
Interesting info, thanks. I didn't know Nvidia had a hair thing too. I'd heard of there being hair things using curves and difficulty getting them into certain renderers - I'm not suggesting a future solution for hair would be some instant thing Daz comes up with, but it is our biggest limit right now in terms of creating and rendering a character (again not a PA fault.)
Actually for human hair longer than about 3 inches (7cm) or so, you'll want 20 or more control points if using LAMH. I personally use about 4 control points per inch.
As to the below, LAMH FiberHair is NOWHERE near that heavy on use even for Iray.
Iray doesn't have splines but I have created some tech that gets around that problem. OctaneRender hair is supported in a current WIP however the DS Plugin developer has NO INTEREST in collaborating. We've been in contact with him numerous times. The previous developer and I almost had LAMH+OctaneDS ready for show until things changed on his end. Be this as it may, I have a method to work around the Octane DS plugin, but it is on the back burner since there is little to no call for it.
As for an ETA... Keep your eyes open for news on new LAMH technologies coming to the store a lot sooner than some think.
Kendall
Forgive my ignorance, but could you perhaps answer a question on this? I realise you might have said so or it should be common knowledge, but I just want a dumbed down version I can understand. I bought LAMH awhile ago but DS always cries about not being able to save settings when it's installed no matter how I try to install it, and I found it kind of imposing to try and make things with so I haven't really used it much.
Just yes or no is fine~
Is it possible or are you working on anything that could make LAMH hair a practical replacement for PAs or users to make hairstyles with for use in Iray?
If no, do you think the future for hair for figures lies in another direction?
Contact me about your problems installing.
Short answer: yes.
Longer "Kendall Answer":
We are working on a lot of really exciting things for both PAs and Users. We have lots of PAs that use LAMH for their personal products as well as quite a number that sell LAMH presets with their products. There are people commercially selling prints (physical wall art) using LAMH presets. There are a number of reasons that "human hair" products have not proliferated in the DAZ store so far, but that is changing. Keep your eyes open for several new LAMH Human presets to be in the store in very short order. In fact, I had expected the first Human preset to be released in the store by this week, but the PA wanted to get things a "little bit better" so there was a delay. For the curious, most of the "Human reasons" also affected the other plugin that is in the store.
Now, and this is just my opinion as a co-developer of LAMH, I believe that LAMH is the future of Hair Creation for DS and for other packages as well. Alessandro and I have not been idle, and things are really starting to bloom. I believe that all of you have seen the terrific work that Alessandro has been doing with LAMH for his animals. We've also seen expansion of the use of LAMH for clothing, for Creatures, and other things. Go take a look at Alessandro's store and see how good things are getting.
There are some "behind the scenes" things that are happening that have kept things under wraps for some time, but rest assured that both current and future LAMH users are in for some pleasant things here in the near future. To see some of the things that I've been playing with, take a trip over to my youtube channel (just use my name in the search). Sometimes I will post short vids of some of the features I'm looking to add into the mix.
Kendall
Managed to fix the install issue - turns out LAMH was unhappy because when I reinstalled Studio last, I moved all of Studio's files away from the default Documents location, but LAMH still insisted on using it. Once I made the folder manually it started behaving again.
This is really exciting news. Of course I have seen the excellent animal LAMH settings that Alessandro has made, but I had no idea development was coming along so much for human uses. My understanding when I first looked into it awhile ago was "great for fur, still not ideal to try and use for human hair." I'm super interested in the idea of proper PA made human hair, even if it is just more controllable for if say a character is upside down, though being able to make or buy multiple hairstyles for the same hair is much desired too. I can do standard mesh modelling in Blender, but more complicated things like dynamics tend to break my brain. Honestly when I look at the LAMH interface I just feel dumbfounded - clearly I'm going to have to look into it more.
While I completely understand you can't announce details of future things too much, it's very heartening to know that efforts are being made towards making the sort of improvements to new technology that's really been lacking from Daz figures (or more specifically, hair and clothing keeping up with the advanced figures.) I realise you've probably made this news available elsewhere already, but many of us customers simply don't notice bits and pieces unless they're in a thread we happen to be reading or it turns up in store, which leads us to a relevant thread (and the LAMH thread is huge and gives me a headache to go through everything, same as the shader settings type one for hair.)
Anyway, thank you for some really interesting news! I'm very much looking forward to what's coming.
Yeah, I've been really excited about this upcoming stuff.
There are a few points of functionality that make LAMH a little too hard for me to do certain things, and it seems like I WILL be able to; body hair, eyebrows, better generation of human hair... woo!
Thank you for commenting on your point of view of the ETA of LAMH support in the OctaneRender for DAZ Studio plugin.
Last time the current OcDS developer made a statement regarding LAMH was on Wed May 25, 2016:
https://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=44&t=54225&p=275958&hilit=LAMH#p275743
-> I interpreted this in a way that indeed the developers of OcDS and LAMH had contact and LAMH developers provided all the information needed.
Maybe it is best if you developers try to clear up any potential missunderstanding yourselves?
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My impression is that users simply trusted that the developers will get this done.
- On the DAZ Studio forum users seem to ask for the same features on a frequent basis. This may give the impression of "vocal support".
- On the OctaneRender forum users ask for a feature, wait for the official answer and then trust that this will get done in the indicated timeframe. Only when that timeframe passed users start asking again...
So please do not interpret silence as no interest.
I am under the impression that users are still highly interested in seeing a solution and are more or less patiently waiting...
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We are on good terms with the OcDS developer, and my post shouldn't be read as antagonistic towards him. Without going into specifics, the current OctaneDS developer has his hands full trying to get a working product. The situation is pretty much "I'll contact you again when I have time to deal with it" from his end. This is fine and we understand his predicament. However, as I said, he has no interest in collaborating right now, and I didn't want this to be seen as a limitation or deficiency on LAMH's part. As I stated, I have a workaround and I may be convinced to make it available (we have OctaneRender), but as it stands we've heard pretty much nothing from the OctaneRender users about interest.
As for "developers working it out"... we have. There is no misunderstanding at either end. He'll contact us when he has the time. Until then, there can be no direct OcDS/LAMH hair -- nothing we can do about that. He can only do what he can do; there are only so many hours in a day. Can I go around OcDS? Yes, but it won't be as efficient as going directly through OcDS,
So far, since LAMH's release, the number of users who have contacted us about Octane have been extraordinarily few. There was an initial conflict with the 1.0 OcDS that had a few people contact us (a handful at most), since that was resolved long ago, the number of folks who have contacted us about Octane (who hadn't previously) have been really very few. If I had to estimate, I'd say the total number was around 10 (Alessandro may have had additional contacts that I didn't). When you consider the many thousands of LAMH owners out there, only hearing from a dozen or so over these years doesn't lead to a lot of confidence that the time spent to polish the feature will provide any return-on-investment. As I said, we have Octane and have written for it because we like it, but that isn't enough to justify the costs for finalizing and support. If we consider that all of the Octane folks we have heard from already own LAMH and would be paying the "upgrade" pricing that would likely be in effect, we'd probably walk away with less than $100 combined "octane induced" sales. This isn't to say it won't happen; it just shows how little we've heard in interest for the feature.
Kendall
@ Kendall
Again thank you for providing some more insight.
Maybe the point of implementing allready has passed the moment in time when it would have been most beneficial anyway. With less than 6GB VRAM that feature would have helped a lot.
But if the Pascal Titan cards indeed offer a significant amount of additional VRAM (12+ GB) then having render engine specific splines supported may become even less requested...
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